I’m from a tiny little farming town in Central Illinois. I grew up in a solid middle class family. I didn’t grow up on a farm, but I could smell the cow and pig manure and our neighborhood was bordered by corn fields on three sides.

I think I always knew I would leave that town. It never felt like a fit. My family moved (under duress, but that’s another story for another time) to a small town on the other side of the Illinois River between my sophomore and junior years of high school.

I went to Southern Illinois University at Carbondale to study journalism. My first job out of college was in Pontiac, Michigan where I wrote for a weekly newspaper and monthly environmental magazine.

I didn’t stay long – working as a journalist, I was barely able to keep up with rent on my tiny one-room apartment. I worked weekends as a waitress in a bar and made more money in tips than I did all week long at my job as a journalist.

While he was healthy and beautiful, he never slept. He had reflux (to a point of vomitting an entire feeding) and terrible itchy eczema. Traditional doctors wanted to put him on reflux meds and cover him in steroid creams. None of this felt right. That’s when I found the most amazing natural health pediatrician in Sedona, Arizona where we lived at the time. She introduced me to herbal ear remedies, created a homemade goat’s milk formula to supplement my breast milk. She was my first teacher in how foods can truly be our medicine.

While in Sedona, I completed a 30-day 200-hour yoga certification program. I had begun my healing journey.

Jack was not yet 1-year-old when we left Sedona for Abu Dhabi with the same commercial real estate company my husband and I worked for in Chicago.